At the very least, I do encourage people who are working on personal projects for explicitly learning and studying purposes to purposefully not use AI. Of course, if the purpose of the project is to learn AI, then that rule is allowed to be broken.
Anecdotal example but I know plenty of students (Including my own brother) who graduated recently who did it almost entirely with AI (unfortunately at the request of their own professors) who can't answer the most basic of questions that I would have expected of sometimes even first year CS students in the days before AI was a thing, which is why I encourage them to build projects without it.
Personally, I'm starting to think that in university and education systems, all projects should now be done in class and in computer labs/monitored study halls because we can't trust anyone to not use AI anymore.
I got out of tech about 5 years ago, before AI really took off. I still do a lot of personal projects and now never use AI. I tried it a bit (only free plans) but noticed how much it caused me to no longer be able to think through a solution myself. I thought I was learning a lot from it but for some reason whatever I learned from it didn't stick. So now I'm no longer using it at all. I do realize that this is very specific to my situation of course.
I would actually really recommend people who are using coding agents full time to make AI brakes for your weekend projects. Think of it like a small break to take the time to reconnect to the code and keep your brain muscles intact, a bit like a professional cyclist going for a casual ride in the forest to experience what they don’t experience anymore in their professional life.
For me its quite the opposite. My employer is too afraid to commit to any of it. Meanwhile, I've built more stable software for myself and my personal computing needs of higher quality and in faster turnaround times.
I've also seen how insanely good at doing a total rewrite / modernization the models can be.
Oh man, I help host a monthly AI meetup called AI Friday: https://aifri.day
My heart sank when I saw this post. I thought we’d created enemies!
No conflict here, though.
Personal example... A few weeks ago, I realized that with all these agents running and all the things I could be working on, I was spending my days managing shallow pings instead of going deep.
I have AI agents managing SEO and ad spend. I used to spend a little time every day reading what each had to say. Now each gives me one detailed report per week, with links to the underlying reports and specific things I need to look at. I block 90 minutes for each one, on different days, and use that time to go deep. It’s helped a lot.
My old workplace did the opposite: we had All AI Fridays where you had carte blanche to build out AI tooling or just work on AI stuff as long as it's vaguely related to your job.
Giving yourself time to be idle and let a problem marinate is often where the breakthroughs and good ideas come from. If taste and human judgment are what separate useful AI output from slop, we need to give our brains time to cook instead of constantly bouncing between agents.
> Study after study shows that using LLMs can cause you to accumulate cognitive debt, make you less engaged with your work, negatively impact your critical thinking abilities, and hamper your skill formation.
False
I've learned more, I am more engaged, it has positively impacted my critical thinking abilities and has increased my skill formation
Sounds good. They're encouraging others to join in but it'd be great to hear if this actually has an impact so far and how its worked out for HTMX. I imagine there are some interesting anecdotes about what actually happens when teams do this.
[Edit] just seen that OP is pitching this rather than practicing it. I wonder if any team actually do have a practice like this...
Nobody should be in a position where they need to clear something like this with their boss. Now, I'm certain people are but that just means those of us with seniority and in leadership have failed those people.
> You can use No AI Fridays to assess what's actually happening and retrospect on the choices the AI made for you.
This should happen daily.....
Let me make a better suggestion.
Pick a difficult/foreign topic that will force you to grow. Learn it with a book and in an "API agnostic" way. For example, it's better to learn about concurrency than goroutines. Feel free to use AI as your teacher or even student, but practice with your own brain.
We need No AI Hours everyday. We need this kind of time every day to clear our minds, reflect on what AI has brought us, and consider whether it's necessary to address the issue of technical debt.
100%. Making it a whole day makes it easier to sell and stick to, that's it. It's just brutal to have a whole day when you need to focus and not just mindlessly prompt.
I find it interesting when people say, “I need time away from the AI to think.” I use AI for development but I would not say I’ve offloaded my thinking to AI. AI is great for pushing text but I haven’t found its system design skills to be that good.
To me the design has always felt like the thinking though.
I felt the same until I actually tried to stop for a week or so. And I could feel the constant temptation and anxiety of not having the coding agents as a sort of safety net. Taking a clean brake made me realize how much I was losing my skills and connection to the actual implementation, not just the high level pieces of it. I also didn’t realize at the time how much of my design thinking is done while working on code, and all the constant small decisions that are actually impactful
Great initiative. I was expecting something like this to happen. I think a good addition to the website can be success stories people share from this approach. Sending a link this to a manager is not very convincing, but managers respond very well to social proof.
"Not too much AI" or "Just enough AI" also, if you feel the need for a No AI Friday it could mean you also need to just use less AI, or try to only use it for the correct things so you don't lose visibility, for example don't let it make decisions for you, have it present the decisions.
Choosing from a set of decisions the agent presents you might feel like you are making a decision, but you’ll never make the one that wasn’t presented.
I’m not going to go that far (you do you), but reading the source code seems like a great way to remain in touch with the implementation. On my hobby project, I do a lot of reading code, asking the AI pointed questions about how things work, and asking it to clean up messes.
So you’re left with the least interesting tasks? Not trying to be too snarky, or too much of a luddite, but that would be a killer for me, motivationally.
This will be the pattern only the "privileged" workers will be able to afford.
Not using AI is similar to giving employees 20% of their time for any non-sprint work.
This privilege of No AI usage a day will lower the productivity, and rarely any companies will allow it (if they track your usage, which I am sure they do)
At the very least, I do encourage people who are working on personal projects for explicitly learning and studying purposes to purposefully not use AI. Of course, if the purpose of the project is to learn AI, then that rule is allowed to be broken.
Anecdotal example but I know plenty of students (Including my own brother) who graduated recently who did it almost entirely with AI (unfortunately at the request of their own professors) who can't answer the most basic of questions that I would have expected of sometimes even first year CS students in the days before AI was a thing, which is why I encourage them to build projects without it.
Personally, I'm starting to think that in university and education systems, all projects should now be done in class and in computer labs/monitored study halls because we can't trust anyone to not use AI anymore.
I got out of tech about 5 years ago, before AI really took off. I still do a lot of personal projects and now never use AI. I tried it a bit (only free plans) but noticed how much it caused me to no longer be able to think through a solution myself. I thought I was learning a lot from it but for some reason whatever I learned from it didn't stick. So now I'm no longer using it at all. I do realize that this is very specific to my situation of course.
I would actually really recommend people who are using coding agents full time to make AI brakes for your weekend projects. Think of it like a small break to take the time to reconnect to the code and keep your brain muscles intact, a bit like a professional cyclist going for a casual ride in the forest to experience what they don’t experience anymore in their professional life.
For me its quite the opposite. My employer is too afraid to commit to any of it. Meanwhile, I've built more stable software for myself and my personal computing needs of higher quality and in faster turnaround times.
I've also seen how insanely good at doing a total rewrite / modernization the models can be.
I specified „people using coding agents full time“
Oh man, I help host a monthly AI meetup called AI Friday: https://aifri.day
My heart sank when I saw this post. I thought we’d created enemies!
No conflict here, though.
Personal example... A few weeks ago, I realized that with all these agents running and all the things I could be working on, I was spending my days managing shallow pings instead of going deep.
I have AI agents managing SEO and ad spend. I used to spend a little time every day reading what each had to say. Now each gives me one detailed report per week, with links to the underlying reports and specific things I need to look at. I block 90 minutes for each one, on different days, and use that time to go deep. It’s helped a lot.
My old workplace did the opposite: we had All AI Fridays where you had carte blanche to build out AI tooling or just work on AI stuff as long as it's vaguely related to your job.
I support this.
I also support No GenAI every day ending in a Y, but I support this, too.
I made the site to convince my boss to let me not use AI on Fridays. Hoping to get some noise around it to make him believe it's real.
I hope your boss listens! :)
Giving yourself time to be idle and let a problem marinate is often where the breakthroughs and good ideas come from. If taste and human judgment are what separate useful AI output from slop, we need to give our brains time to cook instead of constantly bouncing between agents.
Upvoting for visibility, not because I agree. This is really disingenuous, and quite a bad idea overall.
I’d make a joke about there not being a word for the reverse of plagiarism, except there is one: lying.
Have you read the page? I'm the COE of HTMX. I'm the boss.
So is everybody, apparently. https://x.com/htmx_org/status/1726986945430233323
Disingenuous? Plagiarism? Care to explain? I dont even understand what you mean by these words in this context.
AI 24/7
> Study after study shows that using LLMs can cause you to accumulate cognitive debt, make you less engaged with your work, negatively impact your critical thinking abilities, and hamper your skill formation.
False
I've learned more, I am more engaged, it has positively impacted my critical thinking abilities and has increased my skill formation
For me it's AI 24/7 even on sundays
False based on your sample size of one, (which is fine to share), or you’ve also read this somewhere?
If it’s just your own datapoint, is it difficult to self assess?
What makes it false?
Sounds good. They're encouraging others to join in but it'd be great to hear if this actually has an impact so far and how its worked out for HTMX. I imagine there are some interesting anecdotes about what actually happens when teams do this.
[Edit] just seen that OP is pitching this rather than practicing it. I wonder if any team actually do have a practice like this...
Nobody should be in a position where they need to clear something like this with their boss. Now, I'm certain people are but that just means those of us with seniority and in leadership have failed those people.
Got no AI 7 days here. I sold my token budget to other staff and spent the money on beer.
I guess alcoholism is cooler than using AI to do things nowadays, is that your stance?
It absolutely is
One of the strawiest strawmen I've seen in quite some time.
Looking at some of the shit I have to deal with, yes it is.
TODO: insert something about open source, beer, free beer, someone else's beer, trading beer, subgenius, slack etc etc
> You can use No AI Fridays to assess what's actually happening and retrospect on the choices the AI made for you.
This should happen daily.....
Let me make a better suggestion.
Pick a difficult/foreign topic that will force you to grow. Learn it with a book and in an "API agnostic" way. For example, it's better to learn about concurrency than goroutines. Feel free to use AI as your teacher or even student, but practice with your own brain.
Why stop there?!?#NoPhoneWeekends
This is a great initiative! I'm going to send this to my team, hoping to get some positive response. Maybe we should also have code-we-love :)
No thanks
We need No AI Hours everyday. We need this kind of time every day to clear our minds, reflect on what AI has brought us, and consider whether it's necessary to address the issue of technical debt.
I let Claude's 5 hour limits do this for me.
I propose 1 session per day and 3 hours to ingest the slurry into your brain
100%. Making it a whole day makes it easier to sell and stick to, that's it. It's just brutal to have a whole day when you need to focus and not just mindlessly prompt.
I find it interesting when people say, “I need time away from the AI to think.” I use AI for development but I would not say I’ve offloaded my thinking to AI. AI is great for pushing text but I haven’t found its system design skills to be that good.
To me the design has always felt like the thinking though.
I felt the same until I actually tried to stop for a week or so. And I could feel the constant temptation and anxiety of not having the coding agents as a sort of safety net. Taking a clean brake made me realize how much I was losing my skills and connection to the actual implementation, not just the high level pieces of it. I also didn’t realize at the time how much of my design thinking is done while working on code, and all the constant small decisions that are actually impactful
Great initiative. I was expecting something like this to happen. I think a good addition to the website can be success stories people share from this approach. Sending a link this to a manager is not very convincing, but managers respond very well to social proof.
"Not too much AI" or "Just enough AI" also, if you feel the need for a No AI Friday it could mean you also need to just use less AI, or try to only use it for the correct things so you don't lose visibility, for example don't let it make decisions for you, have it present the decisions.
Choosing from a set of decisions the agent presents you might feel like you are making a decision, but you’ll never make the one that wasn’t presented.
I’m not going to go that far (you do you), but reading the source code seems like a great way to remain in touch with the implementation. On my hobby project, I do a lot of reading code, asking the AI pointed questions about how things work, and asking it to clean up messes.
So you’re left with the least interesting tasks? Not trying to be too snarky, or too much of a luddite, but that would be a killer for me, motivationally.
This will be the pattern only the "privileged" workers will be able to afford.
Not using AI is similar to giving employees 20% of their time for any non-sprint work.
This privilege of No AI usage a day will lower the productivity, and rarely any companies will allow it (if they track your usage, which I am sure they do)